Shit! Yes I know it's a funny way to start a post, but after spending quite a while composing a mildly witty entry, I miskeyed and lost the lot - I really hate that!

I'll start over then!

I know I've been slack, 4 weeks away now and this is the first time I've posted anything. It's a sign of just how exhausted I was feeling when I got away.

Week 1: Vancouver was good fun, our accomodation was a self contained flat in an old historic building in a side street, so it was nice and quite. There was lots of snow around vancouver during our stay. They'd had an unusually snowy winter so far, so most of the side streets were full of snow with only tyre tracks clear to drive on. The sides of the streets had a 30-50 cm of snow piled up on them. Driving (we hired a car for a few day) was interesting. Of particular note was the time I was following a small truck sliding sideways downhill on a busy arterial road, at dusk, during a snowstorm! Fortunately our hire car was fitted with winter tires so we didn't have any of those slippery problems.

Shopping was definitely the order of the day, well week actually. Misch and I covered a good bit of ground during the boxing week sales and managed to kit ourselves up with new ski jackets, pants and a bunch of other stuff.

We drove up to Whistler one day and had an afternoon ski, which was fun, the drive was a chore though, large sections of the coast to mountain highway are under reconstruction in preparation for the upcoming winter olympics.